Book of Flaps: An Honest Approach to Sex Education and The Body

Featured Image: Mia Clark

“No Censorship, no advertisers, no air-brushing, no fruit covering genitals and no modelling agencies telling people what they should look like.”

Known for amplifying the voices of those unheard in society, publisher and editor Tori West has began her newest venture aiming to open up the conversation on sex and the body. Flaps, the refreshingly authentic magazine, will be presenting unedited and uncensored portraits from individuals from around the globe accompanied by their experience of sex education and intimacy.

Flaps’s focus on sex education is a crucial alternative to the ‘click-bait approach’ on sex in the media, and, the lack of honest conversation on the topic for a diverse scope of individuals in schools. In an interview with WGSN, West had commented: ‘When it comes to sex and/or our own body we shy away because it’s so personal. I just want to provide a comfortable space to talk about all these things. For me, Flaps is necessary.’

Until March this year, sex education was only compulsory in council-run schools. Whilst it is an improvement that the education is now required, it remains limited and impersonal, often catering to the ‘norm’. On the approach to formal sex education for young people, West commented: ‘One of the things that really hit me this year is that my younger sister is currently 13-years-old and now having sex education at school. Her best friend in her class is gay, but they only teach same-sex education.’ And so, the publication serves as a reflection of those that should be represented in education and the media today. Indeed, by learning about their bodies and sex through a rigid curriculum, impressionable teenagers are taught through the harmful binary oppositions on gender and sex in society, rather than through an inclusive, relatable and diverse perspective. It is no doubt then that Flaps is an imperative publication thankfully dismantling the existing notions of ‘sexy’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘normal’.